Well, I sure didn’t sleep well last night. It must be travel jitters or something. I had all sorts of weird dreams and I swear there was some reason I was supposed to sync up two of my programs or something. Yeesh. Well, I still got up at the same time and went to Hoshino Coffee again. I think the strong coffee is too strong sometimes! Maybe I’m just a wimp.
After saying goodbye to the big celebrity at the hotel, it was time to pack everything into one bag since I mailed most of the gifts that were filling up my suitcase. If I buy any more crap I’ll have to go back to using a suitcase and a duffel bag, but right now I don’t even have my suitcase expanded.
It was mostly an uneventful trip to Osaka. I fell asleep soon after leaving Tokyo and didn’t wake up until the little old lady next to me starting going around trying to take pictures of Mt Fuji. That’s always hard on a train that’s going 300 km/h (186 mph). Something is always getting in the way.
Before leaving Tokyo Station I bought lunch, an ekiben. I had to brave the crowds in the store and reject a bunch of different options, mostly sliced beef, before I found one that seemed more traditional.
And it was!
I made it to my hotel to ditch my bags (check-in wasn’t for another couple of hours) and it was raining! That didn’t last long, but it was colder and windier than I expected. I wandered all over Osaka Station looking for a map of the craft beer shops which I never did find but with time to kill I stood in a line to watch a VR presentation of Panasonic’s home goods. Not that great for the 25 minute wait in the cold but I did get a free mini-tape measure that looks like a microwave.
I can’t remember what other nonsense I got myself into. I do remember fighting with the WiFi on my laptop before giving up and borrowing a network cable from the front desk and searching for a place to eat. I ended up going to Molto! on the 31st floor of one of the Hankyu buildings. They wouldn’t seat me at the window, but all I had to do is look over my shoulder to see the view. I was there for the beer and for some dinner anyway.
I ordered something that I thought would be a beef pot pie but it was beef in pastry dough!
And I was going to follow up with a salad, but I ended up with the smoked plate, where everything must’ve been flash smoked because it tasted smoky but the fish was very moist and almost like sushi.
It wasn’t nearly as expensive as I thought it might be, but it was still ¥6200 or so (~$54).
I was walking home and I knew there was another Molto!, a standing bar, on the way and they had beer from some of the Japanese brewers I met. Even one from Tsutsui-san who I just visited. So I headed in for a quick drink (hah). The other Molto! made me fill out a form to become a “member” and that meant I got a free snack!
That beer looks like a pint, but it was only a glass, so I felt bad about only having one. That lead to a couple more small glasses (from brewers I know!) and that lead to me talking to the paralegal who was standing next to me, and that lead to her taking me to another bar, and that lead to me getting back to the hotel just before my sister at around 11PM instead of 7:30PM if I had avoided the second Molto! altogether. In case you’re wondering, I left the poor woman to her own devices after the second bar and she was pretty tipsy.
And there’s my Osaka adventure so far.

It was another beautiful day in Tokyo and I figured I’d just wander around a bit and make sure I visited the geek Mecca of Akihabara. I went for the electronics, not for the anime stuff and the maid cafés, even if you don’t believe me.

I started out the day at Hoshino Coffee again. They have a good breakfast set menu, and the coffee is quite good and strong, just the way I like it. None of this hipster “bright” coffee nonsense. I ordered the omelette set, which arrived with a huge (for Japan) omelette!

As soon as I took a bite I realized why, it was all airy and fluffy!

I didn’t want to go straight to Akihabara because nothing seems to open before about 10AM here. I noticed that the Ginza Apple store hours said 8AM, so I thought I’d pass by and see what the new iPhone X looked like first. Not a great idea.

I used Google maps to estimate the line was about 400m long (four football fields). Every time I thought I found the end of the line I realized it was just the standard Japanese trick of breaking up the line so people weren’t blocking driveways or streets. There were a LOT of people in line. Later in the day I just walked up to one at Bic Camera, I think, and played with one for a minute.

I decided just to take a long walk to Akihabara, about 40 minutes away, and that wasn’t the best idea either. I’ve walked through a lot of neighborhoods in Tokyo and this was the blandest walk I’ve ever taken. Here’s a shot from a good part closer to Ginza.

After Tokyo Station (which turned out to be much larger underground than I remember)

it was just a wasteland of gigantic construction projects or bleak buildings. I didn’t take any pictures of that. At some point I just popped out into Akihabara. I wandered around a bit and found the old parts stores that had tubes and ancient chips that are still in business and spent way too much money on a Nixie tube display kit.

Then I spent a couple of hours trying to find a store that I used as a landmark, only to realize that the reason I used the store as a landmark was really to find the store where I bought the Nixie tube kit. I sheepishly headed to Mos Burger for a late lunch.

I wondered what to do next, and I finally decided to do the easy thing: visit a shrine. And I was near Kanda Myoujin. I even took the stairs that almost did my mom in on her last trip to Japan.

It was busy! I had to line up to do the usual shrine thing, and saw traditional musicians, shichi-go-san kids, and even a wedding!

Musicians over towards the middle right of the picture.The musicians walking up the red carpet, followed by the wedding party I didn’t take a picture of.

I even had a soft ice cream cone.

After that I headed towards a train station, which happened to be near Kanda’s row of music stores, so I did stop in to a violin shop and peek in the windows to see all the pretty guitars and brass instruments for sale. Funny, I don’t remember seeing any woodwinds or percussion instruments, but I’m sure I’m just forgetting them.

The only other thing of note was going to dinner. I thought I’d try somewhere different and ended up on the Odakyu dining floor at the same restaurant I’ve been to several times before. There was a line of Japanese people and you know how we Asians like to line up. I was afraid to try the places that only had lines of Chinese tourists or, even worse, no line at all.

Fortunately, I felt much better today. It was also a beautiful day with 0% chance of rain according to the liars at weather.com (it rained in the evening) so I decided it was time to visit Shonan Brewing. The head brewer, Tsutsui-san, has visited Portland a couple of times and last month he came to do a collaboration with Culmination Brewing. We’ve been out drinking several times and he took a couple of hours out of his schedule to show me around.

But I started the day out at Hoshino Coffee again, this time getting the Egg Slut. I had it a couple of times last year and it’s tasty.

It takes about an hour and a half on several trains to make it to Kagawa Station in Chigasaki where Shonan Beer is located. I couldn’t find Shonan Brewing on Google maps because it’s really a part of Kumazawa Brewing, a sake maker who has a beer sideline. Lots of craft beer in Japan is made by traditional sake brewers who are branching out. Kagawa station is in the middle of nowhere and the first thing I noticed is all of the old ladies descending upon a restaurant that serves Italian food.

I heard the restaurant was recently on NHK-TV, adding to the popularity. The owner of the brewery has an art shop and three restaurants on the property and I heard he also has plans to add an onsen and a ryokan.

I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures of the brewery, but I did see some tanks from Canby and Portland Kettle Works.

Tsutsui-san even showed me where they store some of the sake for aging, which is a WWII-era underground bunker.

I also had a burger at the less crowded restaurant. Being a Portlander, I had coffee and beer.

I was planning on taking a different route back, through Chigasaki, but JR was having issues all day and I had to take Odakyu both out and back. While it made the ride a little repetitive, it was the cheapest alternative on Google maps and only cost ~¥800 each way

Later I went out to dinner with my old co-worker Suzuki-san and that just meant more beer.

We called it a night early because I’m still a bit jet-lagged and Suzuki-san has a weird schedule and hasn’t worked since he was laid off several years ago. Currently he goes to bed at 3PM and gets up around 10PM. We were both up “late”.

And now I’ve been fighting with putting up this post (and the slowness of uploading pictures) and it’s later than I thought. Time to really call it a night!

I’m getting a really slow start this year. I guess the difference is that most years I’m traveling the first couple of days and so I don’t do anything but sit on a train. This year I’m staying in Tokyo for a while and that’s throwing me off.

I woke up after a poor night’s sleep (jet lag) with a huge headache. My sister says it was due to the beer and that might be true. I started out dehydrated because of the hot yoga I do, and the airplane didn’t do me any favors. I only had two beers (the second looking like it was less than a pint) and the Tokyo air probably didn’t help much either.

So I started out the day looking for something I could keep down because the headache was also making me feel a little nauseated. I went to Hoshino Coffee where they still had Egg Slut on the morning menu but had ham and cheese toast and nice strong coffee.

Then I decided to go to the Seiko repair center to see if they could do maintenance on my Grand Seiko. They told me it would take about a month (they take it completely apart and polish it) and I found a web site that put the cost around $1000! I guess the polishing takes some skill and they can’t do it in the US, so it’s quicker to get it serviced back home. But he suggested I hold off until I could stay in Japan for a month if I ever had that option.

I was wandering around wondering what to do next and I decided to go see “Art Treasures of the Imperial Court” that my mom told me about. Turns out it’s all art commissioned by the Imperial Court made by the Tokyo Fine Arts University, and it was held at the Tokyo Fine Arts University Museum, near Ueno Park. This gave me a chance to wander around the park for a while.

As I wandered through the park, I somehow clicked on food suggestions in Google Maps and that took me to lunch. Mixed fried seafood, and it’s also oyster season. It was quite good.

At that point it was only 1PM or so and I decided to head back to the hotel for a nap. I never did take a nap, but I spent most of the afternoon sitting around and updating my computer and iPhone to the latest release. I did make it out to dinner. Facebook had some suggestions but I used yelp and went to a Nepalese restaurant. It took me through the heart of the red-light district (though that’s really tame in Tokyo).

It was definitely not quiet like Indian food, and obviously I didn’t like it since I left so much of it. Two curries, — one with edamame & potato and the other with chicken & potato — soup, chutney, and dessert. It wasn’t too spicy, but it made me sweat like I was in the hot yoga room. After wandering around a short bit more, I made it back to my hotel room.

I’m meeting my friend Suzuki-san for dinner tomorrow and I’m going to call it an early night again and maybe take a trip to a brewery beforehand. I’ll see how I’m feeling tomorrow morning.

What a long day! It started about 4:45AM when the power went out. Lots of beeping and I set an alarm on my phone just in case. Fortunately, the power came back on at 8:30, before I had to leave for the airport, and all my computers seemed to power on OK. Very few problems at the Portland Airport (besides watching a woman completely losing her shit – I wonder if she overslept because of the power outage?)

That’s not a flattering picture.

Got on the plane and watched my usual series of bad movies: Baywatch, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Mummy, CHiPs, and The Fate of the Furious. Tried to watch The House with Will Farrell and Amy Poehler, but it was too awful.

Got into Tokyo from Narita without too much trouble, but as soon as I got to my room at the Hotel Gracery Shinjuku, I just wanted to call it a night.

Checking in on Halloween meant I got some presents!

But it was only about 6PM, so I had to rally. Packages of presents (half my luggage) to send out to my relatives, and dinnertime. Did anyone think I was going to skip going to the Watering Hole?

The burger was good, on the small side, but when they said large fries they meant large fries!

Everything’s back to normalish in my life. For example, I was supposed to go out to lunch with some co-workers on one particular Thursday, and they texted me from the restaurant telling me they forgot me. It was OK, because I was supposed to go out to dinner. But that got canceled to. But that also meant that I got to use a coupon for a free Jumbo Jack and when I finally got home my smoke alarm started chirping! While I was still awake! That’s about as lucky as I can get, so I put that day in the “win” column.

The f*cking birds are going in the f*cking chimney again, which means about three thousand people are across the street from my house every evening. It’s a bit stressful, especially if you need to drive in or out of the neighborhood at that time. Instead of worrying about traffic and parking on a daily basis, I’ve been walking down to do yoga instead of going to Crossfit. Last time I went to Crossfit, I hurt my back helping someone put her weights away. No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.

Three gym memberships, and I’m down to just going to one. Funny thing is, I’m going to the cheapest of the three.

Huh. I still don’t feel better all the time. Figures. Took a while to dig this hole and it’ll take a while to crawl back out. Weight loss is still a positive.

Yesterday going to the gym helped a lot. My neighbor was telling me he never experienced runner’s high and that’s too bad. Sometimes it happens at Crossfit too, but today I found that sometimes it doesn’t. One of my fellow gym-goers did tell me something that I didn’t fully realize. I told her I couldn’t keep the unhelpful thoughts out of my head and described why, and she said it’s because if we weren’t competitive we wouldn’t be at Crossfit. Even me, the guy who takes the longest to do the workout. DFL, once again, in the gym and probably at life.

Well, I knew the way to stop feeling so stupid about having a crush on someone was to actually ask, politely, if the feeling was even close to being mutual. And the answer of course was no. But I understand this process and while I’ll feel like someone punched me in the guts for a couple of days, I’ll also have several benefits. One is I’m sure this will all go away quicker. Second is, I have little interest in food and I’m losing some weight even more than just by working out.

I’m getting too old for Crossfit. I know there are superb physical specimens even older than I that successfully participating but for me it’s just a way to get hurt more often. I’ve known I should try yoga instead but it’s taken five or more years to finally try it. There’s a Core Power in my neighborhood and I finally am doing the “free week”. I’ve discussed this at length with my neighbor and I’m probably not getting the whole spiritual benefit, but I’m doing it for the exercise. My guess is that some combination of Crossfit and yoga might actually be what I need to do and that expensive gym membership to the Multnomah Athletic Club is going to just be one of the multiple gym memberships I’m going to have.

What do I care? What am I going to spend my money on? I just confirmed my philosophy on dating: It doesn’t work out for Todd. (Or Hisashi, same thing.) I was discussing this with my neighbor. As I was growing up I found very few women who wanted to go out with Asian men. I know it’s changing, but just for younger guys. And when I went to Japan, I found out that Japanese women wanted to go out with Japanese men (not Japanese-American men) or really foreign men (not Japanese-American men). There could be someone out there for me, but so far I’ve found very little to prove me wrong. So gym membership, gym membership, THREE gym memberships.

I’m pretty sure no one is reading this so I can go spouting off, but every time I assume no one is reading this somebody is reading this. Well, I’m pretty sure it’s down to two or three people, tops, so I should be OK.

My life continues to be a series of annoyances, but recently one of my neighbors died. Sam Blackman was great guy, only 41, with two cute boys and fit as hell. The only time I remember being annoyed by his arguments was when he was trying to tell me that we needed to understand the position of Joe Arpaio instead of dismissing him out-of-hand like I was doing. He had his quirks, like being very stingy about his clothing allowance, but with the reasoning that he was going to be in public service some day with a very small paycheck. This coming from a multimillionaire, I’m guessing, who sold his company to Amazon. I would see him walking down the street with his two boys, taking them to baseball or soccer even on cold rainy days. He’s going to be missed by a lot of people, me, our fellow gym members, the local high-tech community, and the state of Oregon.

My little problems don’t seem to matter that much, but that just makes me thing that I don’t matter that much. Thinking like that, along with being tired, makes me feel a little depressed. I usually know how to get out of that by now and that usually just means blasting dance music into my head during the day, and watching music videos on youtube if I feel that way at night.

Then I remembered one of the reasons I started writing a blog was because I started Crossfit and it made me feel incapable, old, and dull. Everyone was younger, fitter, faster, and I was just taking up space and sweating too much. Being able to say that out loud made me feel a little better. That was years ago and what am I doing again? Crossfit again. And in that time since I first started, people are even younger, even more fit, and doing way more interesting things.

The worst part is that I can’t stop thinking about someone and just like most times this happens, there’s no reason for it. I’m a grown-ass man, and I’m feeling moony like I did in high school. At least now over the years I’ve figured out ways to distract myself from this, but now what I’m old I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep and guess who pops into my head and keeps me awake? (Here’s where my sister is starting to think it’s probably a dude, but it isn’t.) I thought I would’ve grown out of this sort of thing, but I guess not.

At least there’s my iTunes to distract me. My iPhone has 1639 songs or 4.7 days worth of music, that gets put on shuffle. Of course shuffle is awful and it plays the same few songs over and over, but tonight it was on point. Walking down to the store it started with 38 Special’s So Caught Up in You, a song that I remember hearing in high school while I was feeling the same way. Then on the way back Alcohol by the Barenaked Ladies came up, which was appropriate because all I was doing was getting my growler filled. Not as apropos but fun nevertheless, You be Illin’ by Run-D.M.C. came up. Ah, the distractions of weird old music. At least it helps me.

My life is a series of inconveniences. Not outright disasters, but I could make a huge list of the things that have happened to me or that I’ve done to myself. One of those things is canceling my DirecTV.

It really wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I kept getting errors about losing satellite signal. DirecTV said they’d send someone out for $90 or so and I couldn’t think of any other way to figure out what was wrong. It was pretty obvious when the tech got here that my neighbor’s oak was getting so large that the dish needed to be moved. After some fiddling around, the tech told me that there were no places he could find with a clear shot and I might just have to cancel.

That meant no football.

I think it took about a week before I signed up for Comcast.

Now I have Comcast, with TV Japan for my mom, though I had to sign up for TV & Internet to get the newest DVR. It’s a little silly since that means I have Comcast Business Internet and also Comcast Residential Internet. I figure that’s just what I have to do to get the level of cable TV service I want.

There’s really nothing that interesting going on in my life is there? Go to work, go home, go to the gym, go home. It’s a little more interesting than that usually but take this last weekend. The friends I have that keep me from being too sober were all busy or missing so I went to the gym, came home, and did things around the house. Sorted QSL cards for the ham radio club (it’s a longer, more boring story, but you don’t need that). Calculated postage for the bundles of cards. Mailed the cards.

That didn’t take up all the time so enough so I spent some time trying to find a way to play Pandora on my Mac without installing Adobe Flash. That meant trying a bunch of programs that didn’t work and then a few hours of porting a program called “pianobar” to the Mac. It wasn’t hard, but it was tedious. If I’d read a little further, I would’ve seen there’s a program called “Hermes” that you can just download and run on the Mac to play Pandora to your heart’s content.

So besides that, all I did this weekend was go to the gym. I have gone back to Crossfit-ing, which really just means a lot of self-doubt and seeing how I’m good at none of the things they do. There’s a lot of hard stuff as well as cheating on some exercises and I’m bad in both areas. It’s really just me beating myself up about my own inadequacies. I’m old, slow, and weak. Ah well. I guess I should be proud of all the work I put in to get this this state of old, slow, weakness.

Sorry, this is a little late. It’s was a long day. I got up at 6:45AM, went to breakfast, packed, went to the airport, got on the plane at 5:30PM, got off the plane at 10:45AM the same morning, and went to bed around 10:30PM but that’s fuzzy. In one time zone, that means I got up at 2:45PM on Thursday and went to bed at 10:30PM Friday. Not real sure why they thought things like that were a good idea for doctors in training.

Lim was bummed about the Nepalese breakfast and she wanted to look for Eggslut (what she called Hoshino Coffee). And according to Google, Hoshino Coffee was all the way across Shinjuku. Two-thirds of the way there we noticed that Google also said they didn’t open until 11AM. What coffee place opens at 11AM? I accidentally found a Hoshino Coffee near the hotel last year and sure enough Google still didn’t know about it but it was there and open. Here we are, slutting it up (we all got the eggslut) morning set.

The coffee is pretty good too.

After that it was packing and then heading to the airport.

Everyone else got off at Terminal 2 to take a flight from NRT to LAX, and then LAX to PDX. I went to Terminal 1 for my more expensive but direct flight to PDX.

I had a lonely lunch in the traditional place. Even had the same thing I’ve had the last few years. The window to my right has a nice view to the runways. It doesn’t make a good picture because there’s a deck between the window and the edge of the building but it’s an OK view.

I also had dessert because I’M ON VACATION. Plus we were going to get parfait earlier and the restaurant in MyLord had closed. The ice cream was old (had ice crystals in it but it was still a parfait.

Oddly enough, outgoing customs was a pain in the ass with another long slow line of Chinese people. I’m not sure what they were doing but for me they just unstapled my forms and sent me on the way.

And then it was off to the flight were we had a familiar flight crew (my mom knows one of the flight attendants). Other than the woman next to me coughing the whole time, it was an uneventful flight where I watched Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Barbershop: The Next Cut, and part of Central Intelligence.

Then it was an uneventful trip through Customs & Immigrations and then three tries to get Uber working and an uneventful Lyft ride home. HOME! Time to rake the leaves and go through my email to pay the bills.